Happy Friday! K and I are officially homeowners!!! WOOOO!!! This long stressful process took way too much time, and too much energy. I don’t believe how wiped I am just from signing paperwork for a couple hours. This is a huge weight off my shoulders, and a big time sink now gone.

IAAPA 2013

For the past few years I have been attending IAAPA, which is the big amusement part and arcade entertainment expo in Orlando. It’s really a remarkable event, and this years was no different. Some of the highlights was a Korean pavilion showing off a ton of new Korean companies and the games / motion simulators coming out of there. Stern Pinball was showing off the new Star Trek pinball game. It was a lot of fun. The best part of the day was the Namco Bandai booth. They had a bunch of new games, but the exciting ones were a new Mario Kart arcade racing game, and MachStorm, an AceCombat / Afterburner inspired game with an immersive cockpit. I will be posting pictures in another post. One of the more apparent things this year was much less piracy, stolen cabinet designs, and game clones. Previous shows there were blatant ripoffs and large displays that almost seemed to encourage it. This year, not so much.

Holidays

The holidays are approaching, and I hope everyone who reads this has a good one. I am going to have time off work, which will be spent working on PiMAME. I’m hoping to have a January release of the new 0.8 version, and I welcome everyone to contribute to the github repos.

Kano.me

Kano computing is raising a kickstarter for a very innovative Raspberry Pi kit, and they have already reached the 500k mark. These guys are really nice and I have high hopes for them.

This week just flew by. It feels like it’s still Wednesday. Maker Faire Orlando has come and gone, and I have to say, it was incredible. I was manning my booth the entire time which always had a crowd but I was able to catch a 10 minute break to eat something and look around. There were so many cool displays, and so many interested people who were interested. By the end of the day my throat was sore and I had lost my voice. It was totally worth it.

I will say this, the X-Arcade Tank Stick is built like a tank. It got hit by hundreds of kids during the Maker Faire and it stood up to the challenge. I’m going to take it apart because I think the right joystick got a little banged up but it was still working.

Python in 24 Hours

Someone who I am very honored to call a friend has just released her new book! Katie Cunningham has just had her book, “Sam’s Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours“, published. I got mine in the mail today so I haven’t gotten a chance to go through it yet, but I have a feeling it will be great. Congratulations Katie!

Pokemon X and Y

Pokemon X and Y come out tomorrow. I love Pokemon, but I haven’t played one of the core series since Red and Blue (I know!). Most of my office is picking the new one up, so I figured it’s time to once again catch ’em all! Between work, grad school, and PiMAME, where I am going to find the time to play…

PiMAME

I upgrade PiMAME to use the newest version of Raspbian, and recompiled the kernel to have the Xin-Mo module fixes in place. I wanted to hold off on the release until I had more to add, but I think i’m going to do an image only release for this, since you can’t really just do a kernel upgrade with an install script. It will also include the PiMAME intro video.

Once that is released I am going to be working on totally revamping the main menu system and web interface. I have some cool things coming down the pipeline!

A new release of PiMAME is being uploaded. This time it’s 0.7.9, and the biggest edition is DGEN, a Sega Genesis emulator. PiSNES now supports 2 players, and the script was updated to not overwrite some of the config files. You can use the update.sh script right now to upgrade. I’ll update this post once the new image is on SourceForge.

Pokemon Rumble U

So, I’m a sucker for collectibles. Make little collectible figurines, add NFC, and let them interact with a video game, and I might as well just hand over my paycheck to the developer. I have so far kept myself away from Skylanders, and Disney Infinity, because I KNEW I would spend too much, but now Nintendo has come into the market with Pokemon Rumble U.

There are 649 in game Pokemon to catch/befriend/see, but the real fun comes with these:

There are 18 different figurines to collect, and each one levels up as you play. When you bring them to a friends house, you can place the little figure on their wii u gamepad and it brings over all your stats and moves.

It’s using NFC tags inside the figure’s base to read and write this data, and if you hold it up to an Android phone with NFC, it will try and read the data. So far I have been unsuccessful getting a good data dump, but it would be neat if I could back up my figures stats and try moving them to blank tags.

Happy beginning of the holidays. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday… To all my friends here in the US, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I spent some great time with my family. To all my friends in other countries, I hope you are having a wonderful week 🙂

Raspberry Pi Camera

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today released the first video of the Raspberry Pi Camera. It looks like it’s going to be an awesome piece of kit. $25, 1080p video, 5MP pictures. I cannot wait to order one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8N7kgtL0-Ts#!

Wii U

So I was able to purchase a Wii U Deluxe set during Black Friday. I was not expecting to come home with one. I was really just driving around looking at the lines. Toys ‘R Us had opened at 8, it was 8:20, and the line was short, so I decided to go in. I went to the back of the store, where the electronics section was, and asked if they had any Wii U’s in stock. I was completely shocked to be given a ticket for a deluxe model. My fiancee didn’t believe it either. 2 hours later (yay, waiting in line to pay) and I’ve got this thing hooked up.

The first thing it needed to do was download a huge update. It took about 2 hours to download and install. After that, it was smooth sailing. The system is awesome. The gamepad is not just a gimmick, it works amazingly well. It acts as a universal remote for my TV and my Cable box. It’s much faster to browse the cable guide using the Dpad than using the remote itself. Netflix is better on the Wii U than on the Xbox 360. To be able to select from the queue on the gamepad, watch it on the TV, or press a button and switch the stream straight to the game pad is so cool. It’s seamless.

Nintendoland is this consoles version of Wii Sports and Wii Play combined. You can use the Gamepad to play the games in single player mode, but to use 2 player you need to use Wiimotes. It’s nice they kept backwards compatibility. The ninja minigame is a lot of fun.

I also purchased New Super Mario Bros. U. The game is gorgeous in hi-def. The multiplayer mode can be a relationship killer though. Just warning you! The game plays like all the other NSMB games, but that’s a good thing. It’s great fun 🙂

To anyone who hasn’t read the webcomic Megacynics, you should start. It’s a great comic, Ash and Steve are cool people. I recently made a DeskCade for them. This time I tried it out of Acrylic. It took less time, but cost a bit more in raw material. I’m really happy with the look of it though. I have to find a better materials supplier.

Ornaments

I’ve also started making some ornaments on the laser cutter. I’m thinking of starting an Etsy store for them. I’m taking requests, so leave a comment!

So this week started off cool then took a turn for suckage. I’ve been working on getting two more emulators working. One is a Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator, and it works, but has some minor issues. The other is another mass emulator like MESS. The older version compiles, but the latest one errors out.

The reason I am not posting binaries at the moment is because my SD card’s filesystem got corrupted during a test I was doing, and won’t boot. I’ve made a bit for bit backup of the card using DD, and I’m going to try and retrieve as much data from it as possible. Luckily I have other SD cards to use.

I was hoping to have the binaries for NeoPop available tonight but I have to recompile them on the new SD card. If you want you can click the link above and download the source and compile it yourself.

The other emulator I’ve been working on compiling is called Mednafen. The old version (0.8) is available in Raspbian repos, so just do sudo apt-get install mednafen and you should be good to go. Make sure you run it once, then edit the ./mednafen/mednafen.rc file. There is a part that says video and it tries to use opengl, set it to SDL and you should be good to go.